Canvas provides ex-rocker an outlet

Monday

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - Nicole Leigh Smith and her man were at their Montana ranch, where he was moping with his right arm in a sling, thanks to recent surgery.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif. - Nicole Leigh Smith and her man were at their Montana ranch, where he was moping with his right arm in a sling, thanks to recent surgery.

Before making the long trip to the nearest grocery store, she encouraged him to find something to do - a rare request of a guy with Jason Newsted's frenetic energy.

"I sensed he was a little down," Smith says of that 2005 day that changed Newsted's life. The former bassist for Metallica, Voivod and Ozzy Osbourne finally had his right shoulder fixed after decades of wear and tear from playing, and he wasn't used to resting.

"I said, 'Why don't you paint today?'" Smith recalled. "And he said, 'Paint what?' So I set him up and said: 'I'm going to be gone all day. Go crazy.'"

Smith, an accomplished artist herself, returned home eight hours later to find her boyfriend - and much of the room - covered in paint.

"We still haven't got all the paint off the carpet," she says. "He was like 'Thanks, Nic, that was awesome.' I was like 'Oh, God, what have I done?'"

What she did was launch a new chapter in the artistic career of Newsted, who has come a long way since Montana. His work, which he describes as self-taught contemporary American art influenced by Picasso, Dubuffet and Basquiat, is on view at the Micaela Gallery in San Francisco until June 27.

"I dove in right away," Newsted, 47, says in his Walnut Creek studio. "It's lemons to lemonade, man. I couldn't do what I was meant to do (play music). It was emotionally devastating."

After that first messy day, the burgeoning painter was banished to the barn where, naturally, he painted the tractor.

By his own admission, Newsted was "whacked out on painkillers" and his initial method wasn't much different from his style of bass-playing: seriously aggressive. It encompassed a lot of slinging paint onto a target, which he says was necessitated by his bum arm.

Being right-handed but having to paint left-handed made painting not only therapeutic, it altered his body routine and, perhaps, stimulated his brain in new ways. Either way, Newsted found a new purpose.

Painting wasn't entirely foreign to Newsted, who grew up on a Michigan farm working with animals, painting and learning public speaking (for which he won a state competition at age 12). But the other hobbies melted away once he discovered rock music.

He joined Metallica in 1986, only weeks after the death of bass player Cliff Burton, starting a whirlwind decade and a half when the Bay Area thrashers became one of the biggest bands in the world. Newsted's departure, chronicled in the 2004 film Some Kind of Monster, was prompted by the band's restriction on outside endeavors. He felt creatively stifled to the point of bailing out.

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